Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of Color

Abstract

This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue-green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of the typical blue and typical green regions in conjunction with Kamp and Partee's account follow degrees of blueness/greenness for the color shades we are interested in. These predicted degrees are compared with the judged degrees, as obtained in the experiments. The results of the comparison support the account of graded membership at issue.

Typicality and Graded Membership in Dimensional Adjectives

“…Since in this study we wanted to investigate whether typicality constrains membership in dimensional adjectives, we decided to use participants' generated typicality data to fix the parameters of the distributions from which membership degree is derived. This approach is in line with the modeling procedure that is customary in the CS framework (see Douven, 2016;Douven et al, 2017) and has the advantage that predicted membership degree results solely from typicality.…”

“…Participants judged abstract indications of magnitude (“a male adult of 176 cm”), rather than visually presented stimuli, in terms of prototypicality and category membership. The typicality judgments allow predictions of membership degree to be obtained, which can be compared against participants’ actual performance on categorization tasks, as exemplified in the work of Douven and colleagues (Douven, ; Douven et al., ). We included tasks necessary to obtain predicted membership degrees both at the aggregate (typicality generation task) and at the individual level (typicality selection task), as well as tasks yielding observed membership degrees at the aggregate (dichotomous categorization task) and the individual level (trichotomous and continuous categorization tasks).…”

The Influence Of Professional Color Competence On Color Lexicon And Naming Pattern

“…Such adjectival constructions suggest an interesting way of color-descriptor production at color category boundaries or in color-space "no man's land". Specifically, in the minds of native speakers, the spectrum is not just divided into non-overlapping percepts corresponding to particular wavelength ranges, but is represented by a range of cognitive entities, or abutting color categories with graded membership of their denotata (Douven, Wenmackers, Jraissati, & Decock, 2017). Therefore, color terms at category boundaries may have not one, but several competing meanings, which, in communication, are specified by the term's combination with modifiers or compounds (cf.…”

Subjectivity in gradable adjectives: The case oftallandheavy

“…Most accounts of vagueness would expect the response patterns of individual participants to display a so‐called Guttman pattern or monotonicity (Guttman, ): a cut‐off point is situated along the dimension underlying the stimuli (height, weight) prior to which the predicate is consistently denied and after which the predicate is consistently applied . Even for stimuli like ours that vary only along one dimension (height or weight), violations of monotonicity are observed (Douven, Wenmackers, Jraissati & Decock, ; Verheyen & Égré, ). That is, subsequent stimuli receive alternating responses.…”